Condell's eye caught a lump, something blackish, sticking out of the ashes. His nose curled as he advanced and caught an overripe stench. There must have been birds nesting in the thatch to produce that smell of burned flesh. Thank God no one had died in the fire, only birds. It had caught in the roof and the Lord's Gallery had gone first, but the actors had known to evacuate and Marlowe's gold had paid for the gallery to be empty. One man's clothes had caught fire as he ran from the theatre, but another customer had had the wit to put the fire out with bottled ale.
Condell took the stick he had with him and poked at the lump. Half of it had melted with the fierce heat of the fire but the rest was clear enough. An iron neck collar, with a section of chain leading off it. Where on earth had they used that as a prop? Tamburlaine, with all its prisoners? Strange he couldn't remember. It must have dropped from the turret or from the Lord's Gallery. A pity The Globe hadn't been built of iron, he thought. If it had, more of it might have survived.
Well, he consoled himself, at least it was an accident. No one, not even Marlowe and certainly not Will Shakespeare, was mad enough to burn down The Globe to make a point.
Epilogue
The Cambridge University Library Cambridge, England 12th August, 2013
'Our revels now are ended.'
They closed the library at 7.00 p.m. in the long summer vacation. It was irritating because he could only come in August, and the extra two or three hours it remained open in term time would have been a godsend. His old college helped with accommodation, of course, But it could do little about food. It was still an expensive luxury, his three weeks intensive research in Cambridge, taken at the expense of his new young wife and even newer children.
The library still had half an hour to go before its official closing time, but the thought police started the campaign to get rid of readers long before that. The litany of announcements stating that books could no longer be borrowed seemed to start at 5.30 p.m. and rise to a positive crescendo by 6.00 p.m. After 6.30, all the library staff, usually so helpful, seemed to start coughing in unison while making busier and busier packing-up noises.
All in all, a strong feeling that his presence was no longer welcome. One box to go of the eight boxes he had ordered that morning of papers pertaining to the life and works of Lancelot Andrewes, sometime Bishop of Ely and Winchester. He wondered if he would ever get this thesis written, with the demands of a parish that seemed to occupy most of Lancashire now being matched by the demands of two young children, and the crucifying worries about money. He was skimping the material, glossing over papers that in the first flush of academic youth he would have pored over for a whole morning.
He had actually started to stand up, on his way to taking the box back to the desk, when something made him stop.
Its catalogue designation stated that it contained unpublished papers relating to sermons planned by the late bishop. Unpromising material, essentially. Lancelot Andrewes had written clearly, fluently and with a commendable sense of discipline. Papers he had discarded as being worth little were likely to be just that, minor memorabilia of no use to someone trying to research the features of a great life. But the new preservation techniques they had applied to these papers were quite extraordinary. The injection process — or was it more properly a process of osmosis? — protected the manuscripts from heat and light depradation, but also meant they could lie on top of each other and be handled by greasy fingers, all the while with an invisible barrier between them and the handler. It also preserved their natural colour. Which was why his attention was drawn to the box. A corner of paper protruded from it. Its colour was different to all die others he had been looking at. More eighteenth-century than seventeenth. He sat back down again, heavily, more tired and dispirited than he cared to admit. Why not untie the box? If at the end of the day he could tell the library they had misfiled a bit of paper, at least he would have achieved something.
It was a folder, he saw, the clumsy eighteenth-century version of a modern wallet file. It had been catalogued with the GRESH prefix. Any historian from the late sixteenth-century onwards knew that was the code for the Gresham family. This was obviously something dating from the first serious attempt to catalogue the vast
Gresham papers, started around the 1780s but which sadly showed huge goodwill but little academic rigour. This particular folder had clearly been part of the Gresham collection, but at some stage had been transferred to the Andrewes papers. Interesting, he thought, his brain starting to engage again. A librarian walked heavily past him, sighing. He decided to ignore it. He opened the wallet.
There! The familiar look and feel of the paper Andrewes liked to use, flowing writing in the hand he had now come to see after three years of research as almost the same as his own. Then one final clutch of papers in a different hand, different paper. That could wait. He turned over the first document in Andrewes's hand.
The code! Andrewes had used a simple code for some of his letters, normally when in correspondence with his friend Francis Bacon and he had the need to say something vaguely scurrilous about a clergyman or courtier of their mutual acquaintance. A clever eighteenth-century librarian had spotted the code and who it belonged to, without having the key to translate it. With the marvellous freedom they had had in those days, the librarian had transferred the papers from GRESH to ANDREWE in the hope that someone else would make sense of them.
Despite this effort, it was probably nothing; just more gossip. Yet something made him take the table from his own file and convert the code to English. There was a heading, first of all. A librarian stopped by his work station and noisily began to gather up books, papers and boxes. He ignored him.
To My Lord Henry Gresham, First Baron Granville and Friend to My Heart
I am dying, my friend, and will shortly find if the Maker in whom I believe with all my heart and soul will pass good judgement on my life…
He could hardly believe what he was reading! The undiscovered last will and testament of the great man himself. Written to one of the most notorious figures of the age. A librarian could have exploded by his side and he would not have noticed. His eyes flickered from the original to the key, his hand starting to shake uncontrollably as it grasped the cheap biro and transcribed the code on to the thin, cheap-ruled paper, far, far too slowly for the pressure of his mind.
… you preserved my reputation, and perhaps even my soul, when by your action you took my plays from me and gave them instead to William Shakespeare. I now concede what I found it hard to concede before. They were always his, for all that my vanity sought to persuade me that they were mine…
William Shakespeare? He ran the code again. Shakespeare. William Shakespeare. Plays? Plays written by the man credited with a great part of the King James Bible? He was set to move on, translate more, but his eye was caught by the bottom paper in the box. Different, cheaper paper. A closer hand. Paper was expensive in those days. All except bishops and the mightiest of lords wrote close and hard together on such a valuable commodity.